The present invention is directed to a method of and an apparatus for improving vision and the resolution of retinal images. More particularly, the present invention is directed to a method of and an apparatus for measuring and correcting the wave aberration of the eye such that the measured data can be used to develop corrective optical elements for improving the optical quality of the eye.
Despite significant advances in spectacle and contact lens design, current ophthalmic lenses still can only correct defocus and astigmatism. Spectacles and contact lenses leave uncorrected additional aberrations such as spherical aberration, coma, and a host of irregular aberrations. These high order aberrations of the eye not only blur images formed on the retina, which impairs vision, but also blur images taken of the living human retina. There have been two obstacles that prevent the use of specially-designed optical elements to correct aberrations beyond defocus and astigmatism in the eye. First, quantitative measurement of the irregular aberrations of the eye has not been possible. Second, a mechanism to correct the monochromatic aberrations of the eye other than defocus and astigmatism has not been demonstrated.
Subjective refractive methods of optometrists and objective autorefractors measure defocus and astigmatism only. They cannot measure the complete wave aberration of the eye, which includes all aberrations left uncorrected by conventional spectacles. The objective aberroscope disclosed by Walsh et al. in the Journal of the Optical Society of America A, Vol. 1, pp. 987-992 (1984) provides simultaneous wave aberration measurements of the entire pupil but cannot sample the pupil with a spacing finer than about 0.9 mm (See Charman in Optometry and Vision Science, Vol. 68, pp. 574-583 (1991)). Moreover, rapid, automated computation of the wave aberration has not been demonstrated with this method.
Recently, one of the co-inventors herein, together with others, developed an apparatus to measure the wave aberration of the eye. In a report entitled "Objective measurement of wave aberrations of the human eye with the use of a Hartmann-Shack wave-front sensor", Liang et al., J. Opt. Soc. Am. A., volume 11, number 7, pp. 1-9, July 1994, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein, the authors disclosed a Hartmann-Shack wavefront sensor that they used to measure the-wave aberrations of the human eye by sensing the wavefront emerging from the eye produced by the retinal reflection of a focused light beam on the fovea. Using the system disclosed therein, the authors were able to measure only up to fourth order polynomial functions. The wavefront fitting with polynomials up to fourth order does not provide a complete description of the eye's aberrations. That description is generally insufficient to accurately compute the optical performance of the eye. This instrument was not equipped to remove unwanted light reflected from other surfaces, such as lenses and the cornea of the eye.
There has also been a previous attempt to correct the monochromatic aberrations of the eye beyond defocus and astigmatism, with the goal of improving the axial resolution of the confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope. Bartsch et al., in Vision Science and its Applications, 1994, Technical Digest Series, Vol. 2 (Optical Society of America, Washington, D.C.) pp. 134-137 (1994) used a fundus contact lens to null the refraction at the first surface of the cornea. That approach, however, suffers from the fundamental problem that the wave aberration of the eye depends on the combined effects of refractive index variations throughout the eye's optics. Possibly for that reason, an attempt to use a fundus contact lens to increase the axial resolution of a confocal scanning laser ophthalmoscope showed only modest improvement.
Another approach is to use a deformable mirror, a device that has successfully compensated for atmospheric turbulence in ground-based telescopes. A deformable mirror was previously proposed for use in a confocal laser scanning ophthalmoscope in conjunction with the human eye in U.S. Pat. No. 4,838,679 to Bille, but no method to measure the wave aberration of the eye was proposed or disclosed. Dreher, Bille, and Weinreb, in Applied Optics, Vol. 28, pp. 804-808 demonstrated the only usage of a deformable mirror for the eye, but only corrected the astigmatism of the eye, which is no better than the correction provided by conventional ophthalmic lenses. The use of an optical element to correct monochromatic aberrations higher than second order has never been achieved. In both those systems, no appropriate method for measuring the eye's high order aberrations was disclosed. Bille et al., in Noninvasive Diagnostic Techniques in Ophthalmology, edited by Masters, B. R., Springer-Verlag, pp. 528-547 (1990) proposed the use of a wavefront sensor in conjunction with a deformable mirror, but a working system was never disclosed or realized.